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Friday, October 24, 2014

On poverty

“The
poor are the incarnation of Christ,” Archbishop Óscar A. Romero wrote as a seminarian in 1941.This month, the Archdiocese of San Salvador asks us to reflect on
Romero’s youthful epiphany in preparation for the centennial of his birth in
2017. “Through their tattered clothing,
their dark gazes, their festering sores, the laughter of the mentally ill, the
charitable soul discovers and venerates Christ,” the young Romero
wrote.Pope Francis echoed the sentiment
in his Lenten Message this year: “In the poor and outcast we see Christ’s face; by loving and helping the
poor, we love and serve Christ.”

Together,
Francis and Romero provide us a spiritual typology of poverty, helping us to
understand why Christians should care
about the poor.Francis considers poverty as a subcategory of what he
calls destitution.“Destitution
is not the same as poverty,” writes the Pontiff.Destitution takes three prominent forms: (1) spiritual
destitution, (2) moral destitution, and (3) material destitution.“Material
destitution is what is normally called poverty,” writes Francis, and is
more or less the result of the other species of destitution, as spiritual
destitution leads to moral destitution which leads to material destitution.

For this
reason, Romero calls poverty “a
divine accusation”—because, like the proverbial canary in the coalmine, it
serves to point out an underlying corrupt condition; ultimately, what Francis
calls “spiritual destitution.”Romero: “The existence of poverty as a lack of what
is necessary is an indictment ... a denunciation of the fact that there are
poor people, that there are people who are hungry, that there are people who
suffer ... why do these realities exist?”

Spiritual
destitution, writes Francis, is that “which
we experience when we turn away from God and reject his
love” and “the Gospel is the real
antidote to spiritual destitution.”Because spiritual destitution is the ultimate cause of material
destitution (poverty), the Gospel is also the real antidote to material destitution
or poverty.Herein lies the connection
between material poverty in the world, and the Church’s concern, which is
otherworldly.

Romero: “Jesus comes into the midst of this situation
not with weapons or with some political revolutionary movement but rather
presents a doctrine that encompasses the great liberation from sin, a doctrine
that promises eternal life.”And
Francis: “wherever we go, we are called
as Christians to proclaim the liberating news that forgiveness for sins
committed is possible, that God is greater than our sinfulness, that he freely
loves us at all times and that we were made for communion and eternal life.”To improve the lot of the poor, we have to
root out sin.

Because
poverty is material destitution, we arrest it by assuming spiritual poverty which constitutes not destitution, but the
quintessential Christian virtue.This
poverty is “a commitment” and a
veritable “spirituality,” Romero
tells us—a commitment to stand by the poor, and a spirituality because we choose
godliness over worldly, material wealth.

“The Christian who does not want to live this
commitment of solidarity with the poor,” Romero admonishes, “is not worthy to be called Christian.”